The Night at the Carnival
by Dr. Barnwell
Summary: What if things had gone very differently for Noah as he attempted to win Allie's heart?
1. Chapter 1

"Goddamit, my hand's slipping…"

Noah grinned as a blush rose in Allie's cheeks. She seemed undecided at first, but quickly relented, apparently believing a date with Noah would be preferable to having his blood on her hands.

"OK, OK, fine, I'll go out with you," she said.

Noah smiled. He was loving this. It was a cheap shot, maybe, but he just had to have the girl. She was beautiful. He decided to draw it out a little more, just to see if she was serious.

"Don't do me any favors," he said.

"No, no, I want to," she said fiercely. Clearly she was worried. No need to be; Noah had frequently climbed all over the ferris wheel after hours at the carnival, and was quite confident of his ability to maintain his grip. Allie didn't know that, however.

"You do?"

"Yes."

"Say it."

"I wanna go out with you."

"Say it again."

"I WANNA GO OUT WITH YOU!" He could feel her breath from eight feet away. She was really scared. It was time to give up the act. He had secured a date with her.

He reached up to grab the bar with his left hand. "Alright, fine, we'll…"

That was when he slipped. Days, months, and years later he would remember the terrible feeling of his right hand loosing its grip, coated in sweat against the greasy support bar. He would reply the moment over and over again in his head when he realized he was falling. He would wonder if there was any other way it could have gone, or if it had been his destiny to fall as he did. He would wonder, but there was no way to know. It was too late.

He slipped, and was dimly aware of Allie's scream and her seatmate's confused yell. He briefly saw the both of them looking down at him in wide-eyed surprise, but he remembered nothing after that.

He hit the support bar below on the middle of his back. There was a sickening crack as his spinal column shattered. He flailed forward, his arms spinning of their own accord, and bashed his head against the base of the seat in front of him. He fell backwards, headfirst, and slammed into another support bar, shattering the bones in his upper arm and breaking six of his ribs. Mercifully (if anything about this could be merciful at this point) he ricocheted off the support bar and into the seat in front of him. He was spared any further agony, but the unfortunate girl on whom he landed was not; her head was crushed against the iron frame of the seat by Noah's deadweight body.

Then it was over. Allie was looking down at Noah's broken body, screaming in unrestrained horror; her date was vomiting over the side of the box; and virtually every person at the carnival had stopped in their tracks, looking toward the ferris wheel, staring in stunned silence.

***

"He's lucky to be alive," the doctor said.

Mr. Calhoun sat in the waiting room at Seabrook General, his eyes red-rimmed from hours of crying. A magazine, unread, lay open on his lap. He hadn't noticed the doctor come in, but he jumped up at the sound of his voice.

"How is he, Doctor?" Mr. Calhoun said in a whisper.

"He'll be paralyzed for the rest of his life," Dr. Gibbons said bluntly. Gibbons was not famed around Seabrook for his bedside manner. "His spine was what we call ­_–crystallized_—even if the technology existed to repair a broken spine, Noah's would be beyond repair. He received a concussion that damaged about sixty percent of his thalamus. He's lucky to remain even cognizant, which he will be, but his sensory perception and reaction will be severely hindered for the rest of his life. One of his broken ribs shredded his right lung, and while we were able to repair most of the damage, he'll be required to wear a Biphasic Cuirass Ventilator suit forever. As I said," Dr. Gibbons concluded, removing his glasses and wiping them on the lapel of his spotless doctor's jacket, "he's lucky to be alive."

Mr. Calhoun collapsed in his chair, his shaking hands going to his face that was wet from a fresh wave of tears. As Dr. Gibbons walked dispassionately from the room, Mr. Calhoun questioned whether or not Noah was lucky at all.

"Doctor," he called after Gibbons, who was almost out of the room, "what about the other girl?"

Gibbons looked back briefly. "The one he landed on?" he said. "She died instantly." And then he was gone, leaving Mr. Calhoun in the empty waiting room.

***

"It wasn't your fault," Anne Hamilton said to her sobbing daughter.

Allie was spread across her bed, her face pressed into a luxurious down pillow, crying uncontrollably. As Mr. Calhoun was receiving the devastating news of his son's condition, Allie was wracked with guilt, having known all along what the doctors had to figure out for themselves: Noah would never walk, never smile, never dance again. It had been clear to her at the carnival.

"It _was_," she screamed. "It _was_, it _was_, if I had just agreed to go out with him before the ferris wheel he would have never followed me up there!"

"He was irrational," Anne said. "It was silly of him to go up there. You're a wonderful girl, Allison, but any sensible man would have waited until you got off to talk to you. It was not any of your doing." She stroked Allie's back.

"I did this to him!" Allie screamed again, as if her mother hadn't spoken at all. "I caused him to chase after me. I've _always _been coy with men, and this time it cost poor Noah his life! He _loved _me!"

"_Loved_?" This time it was her father, who had come to the door of her room smoking one of his interminable cigars. "Now, Allie, the boy had just met you. It was a very foolish thing to do, but there's no way he could have loved you. He hadn't know you all of fifteen minutes!"

Allie sobbed. "Yes, but I just feel it. I truly believe he loved me. It was my fault for not seeing that, for not realizing that he would have done a-a-_anything _to g-g-get to m-m-m…" She broke down again, wracked with sobs, unable to finish. Her mother stroked her back and looked at John, who merely rolled his eyes. _Women_, the eye-roll said.

***

"How…do I look?" Noah asked.

Fin and Frank Calhoun stood by Noah's bedside, unsure of how to respond. In short, Noah looked awful. He looked, Fin had said before he could catch himself, like a side of beef that had just been tenderized. His entire upper body was encased in a nightmarish technological cocoon that emitted terrible clanks and gasps. His legs were useless slivers of meat that would never walk again. A long, Franksteininian gash ran from his forehead to his right earlobe. His right eye was puffed shut.

"Pretty bad," Fin said just as Mr. Calhoun burst into harsh, raging sobs.

"I landed…on a…girl?" Noah asked in between labored gasps. Fin nodded silently, holding back his own tears.

"She…ok?"

Fin only shook his head.

Noah began to cry, then, too, his good eye sprouting tears while his bad eye merely leaked a nebulous fluid.


	2. Chapter 2

**Years Later**

"The stars are beautiful," Allie said. She nestled closer to the wonderful man she was sitting with and laid her head on his shoulder.

"Just wait," her date, the gorgeous and respectable Lon Hammond, said. "It will look like a flower exploded in the sky in just a few minutes."

It was the Fourth of July, and Allie couldn't remember one in which she was so happy. Just days before, Lon had proposed to her. She had accepted the ring with trembling hands, knowing that its circular shape denoted so much more than simple expense---it espoused a life together, something infinite, a love so grand and neverending that Allie felt her heart might burst with joy and leave her dead before she could even marry him. It hadn't happened, of course, and in another moment her mother had glided across the dance floor and held her daughter's arm up for the entire club to see. Lon had run up onstage, stopped the music, and proudly announced to the assembled that he and Allie were betrothed. Allie's father had stood to one side, his mustache twitching, happy for his daughter and for Lon, whom he liked well.

It was easy to see why, too, and Allie knew in her heart that her father didn't like Lon just for his fortune, even if her mother did. Lon was the best sort of fellow, a gentleman who would hold the door open for a lady just as soon as he would crack a joke that would make her laugh herself silly. His chivalrousness, always close at hand in public places, was eclipsed only by the easygoing manner that he reverted to when in private. He knew how to put on a show, and well, but he also seemed to know that behind closed doors such a show has no real use. He would make a fine husband, perhaps an even better father, and Allie knew that her response had been the right one.

Still…

Always, at moments like these, marveling at her good fortune to have found a good man in good public standing with a fine job and an even better demeanor, she would think almost unwillingly of something which should have been years over. Once or twice Lon had seen the dark shadow that would pass over her face as she thought of this, and she would have to make up an excuse as to what it was that had been troubling her---a math problem, perhaps, or a joke that she didn't quite get. Lon never became suspicious. Thank God.

It was not a math problem, or a joke, or anything of the sort that caused her face to slump so. It was thinking of the boy, the boy whose name she could hardly sometimes remember, the boy who she hadn't seen in five years or more, after that one awful, dizzying, traumatizing night at the carnival. What had his name been? Nick? Nelson?

"Noah," she said softly. Lon, now excited like a little boy at the prospect of the fireworks, didn't notice.

She thought of Noah every once in a while, in a passing sort of way like one may think of a childhood friend who moved away very young, or a radio show that you couldn't remember the theme song to. Noah. Noah Calhoun, that had been his full name, and if only the memory of him wasn't so inextricably bound in the awfulness of the accident, she felt she could probably move on and forget him entirely.

She sighed. Yes, she thought of him often, but always only in passing, and only in a way that Lon never caught on to. Not that there was anything _to _catch on to, but just the same Lon probably wouldn't appreciate her thinking of another man, even if she had only known this one for less than half an hour. As she always did, she tried and succeeded in pushing Noah out of her mind, emptying her thoughts of questions of his whereabouts and if he had ever recovered from his terrible fall from the ferris wheel. Then Lon was saying, "Look, sweety, look!" and she gazed up to the sky, and it was lit up in so many colors, red, blue, green, purple, silver, the fireworks crackling like dry sticks on the forest floor, the earth shaking with the thunder of the explosions, and Lon gripped tighter around her waist and she pulled even closer to him, and in another thirty seconds she didn't remember that she had thought of Noah at all.

Several hours down south, the same night sky gazed down upon the patio of an intensive care home. All about, people were strewn amongst the tables and chairs, some in wheelchairs, some using walkers, some only sitting down with no visible ailments but with blank stares on their faces. Everybody looked up, anticipating Seabrook's own fireworks display, which was infinitely less grand than Charleston's, which Allie gazed upon miles away at that very moment.

Amongst these chairs was a bed, the type that folds up and down with the touch of a button and also has wheels for easy transport. The sheets had been stripped from the bed---it was an awful warm night, even for July---and on top of the mattress lay a pitiful form, a crushed specter that seemed less than human, occasionally offering a twitch or a grunt, such indications more often than not signaling a bowel movement that needed tending to.

Next to this bed sat the father of this poor wretch. Mr Calhoun reached over and gripped one of the waxen hands of his son's all-but-lifeless body. The respirator, a terrible, awful thing that clanked and groaned even more than Noah did, breathed out a steady stream of exhaust and whirrs as it sat encapsulating Noah's chest. Mr. Calhoun squeezed Noah's hand. "Noah," he said, "it's almost time for the show."

Noah rolled his head in the direction of Mr. Calhoun's voice, and Mr. Calhoun knew that his son couldn't really see him. The doctor, all those years ago, had said Noah would survive, but he didn't say that Noah's cognizance would deteriorate rapidly over time; indeed, most of the doctors and nurses in residence had been surprised as how quickly Noah had slipped into a vegetative state, first not talking, then needing to be force-fed three meals a day, culminating with the staff having to check his diaper every few hours to make sure that the poor soul hadn't soiled himself. Noah had become a zombie, something worse than a zombie, even; damn-near catatonic.

"Noah," Mr. Calhoun said, gripping his hand. "Noah, Noah, Noah. Is there anything at all that will ever wake you up and bring you back to me and to this world?"

Noah only wheezed, a line of drool dribbling from his mouth to the bed. Mr. Calhoun let go of Noah's hand, where it stayed in the exact same position, unmoving, a cheap imitation of real life. Mr. Calhoun placed his hands in his head and wailed. Overhead, Seabrook's pitiful display of second-rate fireworks shot up into the night sky, reflecting off the eyes of Noah Calhoun, eyes that couldn't see the bright colors as they lit up and then fell to the earth.


End file.
